Life

AUTOCON : THE REAL COVERAGE

The couple of days before AUTOCON were super stressful. Most of us were in a frantic hurry to finish our cars for what we expected to be an awesome show. Some of us even worked on our cars the night before the show, while we were having our family Christmas party. I only had 1 hour of sleep total for the 2 days prior to AUTOCON. There were a lot of disappointments for my car even though I had put so much work into it. My wheels weren’t sealed correctly, my body kit didn’t fit, and my motor was only running on 4 cylinders. Despite all that, I still looked forward to AUTOCON because of all the hype. People mentioned how great of a show it was last year, so I expected the same this year. But before I tell you how the show was, I’ll just give you guys some insight on what Royal Origin was doing during the show.

Our roll in time for the Royal Origin x Canibeat collaboration was at 7:00 AM. Yes, that fucking early. So, we had to gather up the whole crew and meet up beforehand at 6:30AM. We had 31 cars total, including Royal Origin, goodfeeling, Sexy Squad, Lowballers, Boss Company, and Studio. Caravaning to the event was freaking awesome; it was like being in a parade of slammed cars. If that’s how my day was going to start, I knew that the rest of the day would be even better, right? Wrong. When we got there, all we saw was a parking lot that was gated, with a deep incline where most of us scraped our cars while going in. When they said El Toro Air Field I was expecting an airplane hanger or being on an air strip. Nope, it was just a parking lot that smelled like manure, like forreal. Thank the JDM Gods that it didn’t smell like that the whole day; it was either I got used to the smell or it just went away magically. Anyways, I left around 9:00 AM to go to 714 Tires to get my Equips remounted and was hoping it would hold air. Therefore, I missed the staging part of the show. From what I was told, Justin just gave us a corner and said do what ever we want. We were all pretty surprised because we thought that since we were told to come at 7:00 AM sharp, they would have a plan for us that required us to be done setting up early. If we knew that that was the case, we could have just come later and staged ourselves in 15 minutes because all we did was park the way we do at meets. Randomly. It was a waste of our time because all we did was stand/sit/sleep from 7:00 AM to 11:00 AM.

When I got back, the food trucks were starting to park and open up. The gate that the vendors and people who were showing were entering through was still open, which I thought was a convenient way for us to get to the food trucks. Unfortunately, when I tried taking that route to get to the food trucks, it was closed. Because of that, we had to go through the entrance where they were searching people, walk all the way around the gate to get to the food trucks and then come back and get searched. What a hassle. This is a little diagram of how it looked like, in the picture by JDM Life Style. The red spot is where ROYAL ORIGIN was, the pink spot is where the new entrance for spectators was, the blue spot is where the food trucks were and the yellow spot is where there was a convenient pathway, but they closed it. The light blue is where they should’ve had AUTOCON at the air base hanger…

Now, you must be thinking “Fuck Minh, you’re so fucking lazy and it’s just that you guys were placed so far, so it was inconvenient for you guys.” No ninja, we were technically the closest to the food trucks. Imagine if we were in the corner right next to the yellow spot. I would have to cut through the entire show just to get to the food trucks.

As the show progressed, it was cool seeing all the people line up to get into the show. I was thinking, “Damn, a lot of people really want to check out the show,” but then I remembered that the first 100 people get in for free, so these were just the people who didn’t want to pay 8 bucks to see the show. I walked around the show with Chivas to check out the model lounge and damn, these girls were not what I expected… I’ll let the picture, by The Chronicles, explain itself.

There were some cute models like Eva Skye, Holly Lee, and Gabby Jeane, but they were definitely over shadowed by these ones. When we got back to our area, some people were being judged and I thought it was odd that only one person was judging. I’m probably only pointing this out because I’m more use to a group of judges that walk around together and judging cars like at Nisei. So basically, it was up to one person to decide who would receive the awards. Honestly, we don’t really care about awards and all that jazz because our cars are not show cars, but seeing how this show was being judge really just put a bad taste in our mouths for car shows. If you think about it, one person judging 350 cars is not really realistic. How many of those owners might be that judges’ friend? Of course, they’re going to get better points, not the fact that the judge is friends with them but it’s because the judge knows more about their build than the rest of the cars. This is why I rarely go to car shows, because everything is biased, but everyone knows that, right?

So, finally we get to the car coverage. The sun was coming down, and this was the time where all the good photographers were out shooting. Photography by me and Alex Yoshioka.

Damn, this TC would look hard as fuck if it were black. Ordens make any car look awesome.

The show started to end and there was a rumor going around that they already called the winners for the awards, so most of the show was starting to leave. I was about to go home too, but Shavi found out that they were doing the awards announcement late. So, we stayed back to see who won what. I saw that they were giving away goodie bags for those who showed and it included a raffle ticket to win a watch. Can’t really call it a goodie bag when there was nothing good about it. It included an Autocon sticker that they were giving away throughout the show, a poster that you could pick up from the model lounge, a lanyard, and a Scion keychain.

I basically gave everything away except the raffle ticket because I saw from the posts on the Autocon website, that they were raffling away 3 Meister watches (http://www.autoconevents.com/wordpress/?p=302). The MC for the awards and raffling was horrible. He was calling numbers left and right and didn’t give anyone a chance to come up to the stage to get the prize. Lucky me, I got called and I was right in front of the stage so I just jumped on and said I’m the winner. You would think when they do raffles, they would just hand you the prize and off you go. No, they had us wait 2 hours for them to find the watches. They even made us dance for it. The three of us were just standing there dumbfounded, watching people get their awards. The MC called the numbers so fast that no one really gave a fuck who won. Lol @ the meister watch..

I know, who the fuck am I to complain about this show? This is just my honest opinion and I hate complaining about someone’s hard work, but this show really pushed me beyond my limits. I see everywhere how other sites are saying how awesome Autocon was and that it was awesome for the photographers, but it wasn’t Autocon that made it great. It was the cars that were in it, the crews that showed up, and the people who owned the cars. All of the cars that were in the show, I see them at every meet and show, so it just so happened that EVERYONE was actually in one place. Therefore, shout out to the crews that made this meet great: BPVIP, Royal Flush, Low and Slow, Team Nuisance, Auto Concept Elite, goodfeeling, Platinum Vip, Sexy Squad, Boss Company, Studio, 1UP, Tjin Edition, Auto Fashion, VIP Modulars, and special thanks to Canibeat and John Zhang for getting us in, IMKING for making our shirts, and David Vu for the snacks and drinks. I’ll end it with Mr. Zhang, saying peace out to dem haters.